Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
a Washington, D.C., nonprofit organization called Environmental Media Services contacted me in
August 2004, mentioning that she had acquired a small budget to help climate scientists communicate
to the public. Things were starting to come together.
My three colleagues and I agreed to take the offer of free Web space and support—and
assistance with publicity for the launch—from the organization. No compensation was offered for the
effort, nor would we have accepted it if it had been. This was, after all, a labor of love on our part.
We would exercise all choices over content and maintain editorial control of the site. What we
envisioned was a central resource where interested members of the public, journalists, and policy
makers could see what actual working climate scientists have to say about climate-related issues of
the day. There was already a very good model in another field for this sort of collective group
science blog: Panda's Thumb (an homage to the late Stephen J. Gould's wonderful book by that
name). Panda's Thumb was run by a group of more than a dozen evolutionary biologists enjoined in a
common effort to communicate the science of evolution in the face of creationist antiscience attacks.
Our mission would be similar. We would address analogous antiscientific attacks against our own
science while providing a relatively nontechnical ongoing assessment of the scientific understanding
of climate change.
The name—RealClimate—followed naturally. We launched the site on December 10, 2004,
accompanied by a press release distributed to news outlets far and wide. In the end, a dozen or so of
us participated in the effort. Each was an active, publishing climate researcher from the United States
or Europe, and we were at varying stages of our careers. We also invited articles from a large number
of guests. While our posts were not peer reviewed in the conventional sense—indeed a formal peer
review process would be at odds with the necessarily fast reaction time of a blog—we tried to
emulate the process internally. When one or more of us wrote a post, we would solicit feedback,
criticisms, and suggested revisions from other members of the group.
We wanted readers to learn from the comment threads, rather than be misled, upset, or even
repulsed by them. We thus chose to enforce a policy of moderation in our discourse. Polite debate and
healthy challenges were permitted. Insults and regurgitated denialist talking points were not. The
etiquette, as Gavin Schmidt liked to analogize, was similar to that of a dinner party. You are welcome
to stay at the party as long as you don't shout obscenities or insult the other guests and hosts. The blog
provides a rare opportunity for those genuinely interested in the science to communicate directly with
the experts in the field.
When we launched the site, we got considerably more attention than we had anticipated. Within
the first month, news articles about RealClimate appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Washington
Monthly
, both
Le Monde
and
Libération
of France, the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
,
New York Newsday
,
MSNBC
, the
American Prospect
, and even the ultraconservative
Washington Times
. We were
pleased, too, by the warm welcome from leading scientific journals.
Nature
devoted an entire
Scientific American
chose us as one of the twenty-five best science-oriented Web sites our first year,
2005.
36
A primary purpose of RealClimate was to provide the context so often missing in mainstream
media coverage of the science. It's the conundrum—discussed in
chapter 6
—that the methodical and
incremental nature of scientific discovery does not lend itself well to the “news peg” and the twenty-
four-hour news cycle. Many of our posts were aimed at providing the background needed to
